• Recent Posts

  • Neurology examination
  • Go game web site
  • Brutal Dutch football
  • Final word on God
  • Sleep revisited
  • Bird song update
  • Contrary brain
  • Cause and effect
  • Rollercoaster
  • Virgin on the ridiculous
  • Teaching the Chinese game of Go
  • If I were God
  • Catastrophising
  • Mood
  • Spam commenters

• Categories

  • Atheism (21)
  • Business (4)
  • Health (26)
  • Life (74)
  • Psychology (52)
  • Religion (26)
  • Sport (4)
  • Technology (2)
  • Uncategorized (11)

• Archives

  • August 2010 (2)
  • July 2010 (3)
  • June 2010 (2)
  • May 2010 (2)
  • April 2010 (1)
  • March 2010 (3)
  • February 2010 (2)
  • January 2010 (6)
  • December 2009 (3)
  • November 2009 (5)
  • October 2009 (3)
  • September 2009 (2)
  • August 2009 (4)
  • July 2009 (6)
  • June 2009 (7)
  • May 2009 (6)
  • April 2009 (10)
  • March 2009 (2)
  • February 2009 (6)
  • January 2009 (9)
  • December 2008 (5)
  • November 2008 (9)
  • October 2008 (2)
  • September 2008 (2)
  • August 2008 (1)
  • July 2008 (2)
  • June 2008 (4)
  • May 2008 (4)
  • April 2008 (1)
  • March 2008 (6)
  • February 2008 (10)
  • January 2008 (14)

• Meta

  • Login
  • Entries RSS
  • Comments RSS
  • WordPress.org

Real quickie. After looking at a picture of Muslims praying in a Mosque to Mecca, I was wondering if they ever thought they might be ‘aiming’ in the wrong direction onoccasion.

How would Allah appreciate an array of bottoms upturned towards him?

Started a new project. A meta project. Like a PhD really, in a crude sense.

To revisit the books that have had a major influence on me and :

• Extract the key matters of interest to me
• Follow up selected references and see where they take me
• Link different threads across books into themes
• Write the findings as a book

As an example, an underlying theme to Taoism is to liberate oneself from one’s Ego, and to accept what is. The pronunciation of Ego is the same as the Japanese for the game of Go (but spelt Igo). Progress beyond a certain level in Go is not possible without accepting setbacks within games. If your ego holds onto failing positions, they become worse, and the ego becomes enflamed.

So a parallel here between the attitude in an Oriental board game to attitude to life, as exemplified in an Oriental philosophy.

My research today has been on the 2nd reference on page 1 of 58 pages of references of ‘Trick and Treat’. The reference took me to a web site that followed on from the research in the reference. One nugget gleamed from that site was the discovery that liver is the most nutrient dense food you can eat. Amazingly good for you, and highly prized by many peoples still adhering to ancient ways.

Not many people like liver. I am happy that I love it. But many people eat it raw. Now that takes a bit of getting used to I feel!

This project is something of a long, ongoing one. But having started it, I feel energised. Takes my mind off my lost passport - which I need in order to get an American Tax Id which I need  to start publishing directly to Amazon.com. I want to write some more books this Winter and that route yields very favourable retail prices. Ridiculously low retail proces in fact.

If you are interested, that self publishing route is via CreateSpace.com. I have a book in proof with them I wrote in 2008 - I need the tax ID before it goes live.

And if you want your book designed and published, I am happy to help for a low cost.

This is a light, and possibly flippant blog, so treat with appropriate disdain. But it may have value.

It is fairly well established that vegetarians tend to struggle to replicate the nutritional value of red meat, often missing out on the odd amino acid.

And it is probably well established that homo sapien and his forefathers ate red meat as a staple diet for large parts of the previous few million years.

Yet, red meat is treated as a ‘dangerous’ food in anything other than small quantities.

But this is not my point. Nearly there.

Now picture your average stone age man hacking apart a culled bull, and tucking into this massive source of food. Now the edible parts of such a large beast principally comprised muscle, fat, and vital organs.

Occam’s razor would say that the most likely scenario was that all of these were eaten. It is extremely unlikely that only the lean meat were eaten. Experiments on a protein only diet yield severe health problems with days.

The fat and vital organs are up there with the protein in terms of edible value to the stone age man.

So why, then, the additional widely broadcast aversion to the dreaded saturated animal fats? Precisely where did stone age man get his fats? Did he ignore the fat of the animal to seek out avocados and nuts?

To my mind, it makes eminent sense that the fat of an animal is equally valuable as the protein. It makes too little sense otherwise.

I’ve been eating a very low carbohydrate diet for 11 weeks now, replacing the energy from the lost carbs by an increased amount of fat. Fat derived from meat, fish, nuts and vegetables such as avocados.

In that time, I have been playing football once or twice a week. My legs are getting stronger, and, coupled with 12lbs weight loss, I can zip around a football field much like I did some years ago.

But the salient matter  is that I have incurred not one muscular strain or tear in that time. It is not a long time, but I have had years recently when I incurred 15 new injuries in one calendar year.

http://www.buffalo.edu/news/6181 covers recent reaserch with, admittedly female, runners over a 12 month period. There was a very strong inverse correlation between quantity of fat in the diet and injury susceptability. Eat the recommended low-fat diet and do lots of sport and you leave yourself prone to inhuries.

To me, this makes enormous sense. Beef is a dry meat without the fat. It is in fact muscle. So muscle short on fat is also dry, and therefore less flexible. This is simplistic, but you get the point.

Of course, impact injuries are not covered by the fat levels now in my diet. But recovery from them is. Good fat levels accelerate healing.

It is highly likely that the transient osteoporosis I suffered with in my left hip years ago was caused by a fat deficit in my diet.

Yet another book. I have no idea quite how many books I have bought this year, transported to me swiftly courtesy of Amazon Prime. The urge to buy just one more book, knowing that it will arrive in less than 24 hours is like a drug.

The latest is, as to be expected, on the theme of the Ego, and letting go of counter productive thoughts. It is entitled ‘Love what is’. Meaning to accept and embrace what happens around you, rather than fight it. A life spent trying to massage the World to suit your desires and expectations is a frustrating and generally fruitless one.

I accept this, and am indeed gradually (painfully) trying to adopt this mantra.

But one thing niggles (in a meta-sense). Namely this general consensus that all stress is thought caused.

Now I am, I believe, an often sharp self observer. When someone sneezes angrily, my attention is rudely dragged away to focus on this sound. Unless I am hyper focused, i have no choice in the matter. Noises incite an immediate emotional and attentional reaction.

When I am, for example, relaxing, reading a book in a coffee shop, and a loud sneeze swiftly thrusts my attention from the book to the angry sound of the sneeze, I get angry with the person for disturbing my harmony.

Of course, it is not the person’s fault, and I recognise this and quash the anger. The anger is caused by the thought, as per the general consensus in these self help books.

However, the thought followed the instant attentional change of focus, and the emotional unsettlement that caused. I was annoyed that I was both distracted by the sneeze, and unsettled by the emotional impact of the sneeze noise.

I believe that the attentional hijacking, and emotional assessment of someone in distress precedes any thought- precedes the rationalisation of what happened.

So if, according to these books, my stress is caused by my thinking, then yes, I can address the anger, but I cannot really address the instantaneous attention and emotionally unsettling nature of the event.

This tendency to be so acutely affected by noises, such as people eating noisily, doors slamming, is heightened in myself, because I suspect I am on the autism spectrum. The aspect of autism where sensory input is not filtered enough, resulting in ready overload. It explains why I am constantly seeking relaxation and harmony.

However, when in a harmonious mood, noises affect me very much less. So maybe the picture I am painting is not quite that simple.

Does this ring any bells with your self?

On the current theme of trying to sort out the overtly negative control my ego has on my life, I observed a typical scenario unfolding in the last few days.

2 days ago, I arranged to meet my friend Nick for a coffee. Except I went to the wrong coffee shop. I should have rung him when he did not appear, but I had a bit of a headache and was happier on my own, to be honest.

Anyway, the next day the truth outed - he sent me an angry(ish) text. I apologised and we met up again.

As with the previous time we actually met up for coffee, he stood behind me so that I had to buy the coffees. And remember, Nick has more money than he knows what to do with. I felt a bit embittered by the stupidity of someone not earning money paying again for a coffee for someone who has way too much.

When we sat down, he met some mutual friends. So we ended up barely talking to each other, talking across each other.

We both held some bitterness towards the other.

We were both stuck in the quicksand of pettiness, fueled by injustice perceived by our egos, and given a high level of importance than was really ever warranted.

However, letting go of perceived taints is very much a work in progress for me. Calming my ever demanding ego down and just letting go of past emotions/thoughts is a skill that will likely take me a while to acquire.

Later on yesterday, my fridge-freezer stopped working. On the hottest day of the year.  All the freezer food - about £50 worth - was softening in the heat. I turned it off and it came back to life and then died again.

And I hung strongly to the sheer waste of food emotion. I hate waste.

As it happened, I turned it around, letting go of negativity. I gave lots of food to neighbours (and let go of any feeling that this would be a favour that would buy me some ‘credit’ - now that’s a tough one to do), and then had a great idea. I would feed the ‘wasted’ food to cats that come into my garden. They would smell test it first and reject any that got infected by the defrost/frost cycle.